11 ms·
A server that wasn't meant to exist
- NKosmatos 1y ago> Because sometimes, dishonest people do win. Let me fix this for you… Because always, dishonest people do win. Good read and it would make a good short film :-)
- mulmen 1y agoThis is needlessly negative. It’s clear that dishonest people do not always win. Disproving such a claim requires finding only one case of a successful prosecution for fraud.
- notpushkin 1y agoDisproving “winners are always dishonest” would be a bit trickier! (Mainly because nailing a definition of “dishonest” is just too hard)
- mulmen 1y agoThe only useful definition is “breaks the rules of the game”. Using this definition one honest victory in a perfect information game disproves the assertion.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y agoCreepy
- jagged-chisel 1y agoI think I missed something. They later offered the guy the world to solve problems. He declined and then complains they wouldn’t provide the tools he needed. Part of “name your price” should include whatever tools - up to and including ownership of processes.
- kentm 1y agoYeah I think something was missed. My wild speculation is that the person thats "causing issues" has a privileged position with the owners. The owners are unwilling to completely cut this person out of the business, and that is what he means when he says that the owners won't provide the tools he needed.
- asmodeuslucifer 1y agogood read.
- johnklos 1y agoI've seen situations like these before. This is why off-site backups are so very important. I've also been in the same position of providing data from a backup that someone was intentionally trying to destroy to escape responsibility. This story even hints at a common theme that happens even when people aren't trying to destroy data - that some people will tear down whatever they inherit, then blame their predecessors for the problems that result.
- apples_oranges 1y agoBut if you don’t blame them it can also backfire. I inherited a bad codebase once and tried my best to improve it. But there was only so much time. When I left the guy after me blamed me for the still bad parts immediately.
- ipaddr 1y agoHe would blamed your new code if you rewrote. People who blame are juniors. You are not really a senior if you blame.
- jbeninger 1y agoJuniors blame. Seniors silently judge.
- pavel_lishin 1y agoIt's a proud tradition, to gasp silently, mutter in anger as you run git blame, and only discover that you're the person who wrote the code about 20% of the time.
- lukan 1y agoAh that reminds me of a classic Dilbert comic, The code mocking https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/195lc8/when_you_hand_over_code_to_others_for_maintenance/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/195lc8/whe... (Reddit, because Dilberts creator and his website have gone off the rails)
- duxup 1y agoIt's always interesting to me how easily corruption occurs. I always assume that accounting double checks things and so on, but I've seen so many business where someone just creates an account and money goes out and ... nobody notices for years. I've even created automated invoices for some companies and realized that some data was missing for months. And yet they got paid significant amounts. I realized that the invoices could have been for just about anything and they would have gotten paid ...
- forinti 1y agoWhen Robert McNamara took over Ford, accounting was so messed up, they would weigh their invoices and if the amount wasn't too far off from the expected dollars/pound ratio, they would pay it.
- duxup 1y agoEven Google evnetually caught a few people who just cold sent in invoices and found that Google would pay.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y agoOne guy was caught doing that to the tune of $100 million to Facebook and Google. If he had stopped at $1 million or something he probably would have got away with it. I suspect others have. https://www.npr.org/2019/03/25/706715377/man-pleads-guilty-to-phishing-scheme-that-fleeced-facebook-google-of-100-million https://www.npr.org/2019/03/25/706715377/man-pleads-guilty-t...
- whstl 1y agoI was reading this whole thread flabbergasted and wondering "where the hell are people working that this happened" when it hit me: I did work in a place where a manager was invoicing monthly "external design work" to the company to the tune of 5x his own salary, because the company's designer was "overwhelmed". In the end he was just paying the hired designer a little extra to drag her feet and paying a Fiverr freelancer to do some cheap mockups with Figma. And obviously cashin' in the rest. I only found out about several months after I left. It was interesting for me to have all this revealed because this guy was actively working to undermine all other engineering teams, with gossip and by blocking work. I didn't interact much with him or at all, but he was part of why I left. The fun part: he was only fired a few months after the BOARD ITSELF fired the CTO, CPO and CEO all in the same day. The company was 90 employees when I joined, 900 when I left, zero in 2024, and now was sold for scrap to a micro-sized competitor. I wish I was a writer because the stories I have of that place would be an amazing book.
- renewiltord 1y agoFantastic war story. There's always like these dozen hangers-on who've made their fortune parasitizing successful people.
- forinti 1y agoReading through it I had a feeling it was in Italy. I was bit sad to confirm it.
- draga79 1y agoItaly, but no organized crime involved
- jeremyjh 1y agoBut tax evasion, right?
- draga79 1y agoNot exactly. Just a few people who were diverting large amounts of the company’s money into their personal bank accounts, taking advantage of the fact that that type of business, at the time, had a particular tax regime and no direct tracking of the amounts received in payments.
- draga79 1y agoAuthor's note: Many readers, understandably struck by the severity of the events, have speculated about the involvement of organized crime. I want to clarify that, while the situation was extremely problematic and dishonest, that wasn't the case. The "worst parts" I alluded to referred to other internal dynamics, abuses of trust, and improprieties that I prefer not to detail further for privacy reasons and to avoid weighing down the narrative.
- Boogie_Man 1y ago[flagged]
- theandrewbailey 1y ago> I even worked on translating Archivista’s interface into Italian, since it wasn’t yet localized, just to make it easier for users. A certain Italian-speaking area is legendary for its organized crime syndicates. Would anyone be surprised if that was the case here? Kinda hard to imagine it not.
- draga79 1y agoNo, It wasn't organized crime.
- johngalt 1y agoOrganized crime would be more... organized. There would be servers, infrastructure and documentation. Designed to say exactly the right thing to whoever was looking. This is garden variety, SMB fraud. "We trust Tim, and never had a problem so we don't need to invest in all these controls. Tim is really vehement that the controls are useless and he's refusing to participate. No we won't make him comply. No we don't see any conflict here. Please continue to fix the problem anyway."
- dgfitz 1y agoCan you elaborate at all as to why you didn't make the phone call you eluded to that made the other person change their tone? I assume out of respect for the deceased/leaving skeletons in the closet?
- draga79 1y agoSure, I can say this. The person I would have called, someone very close to me, would have been extremely disappointed to learn what was happening. They were very proud of having helped, during difficult times, the very person who was now threatening me. And since this person close to me was facing serious health issues (though still had authority), I chose to avoid causing them further pain that, ultimately, would have been pointless at that moment.
- freehorse 1y agoProbably there was a lot the family did not know about the deceased father.
- vaadu 1y ago[flagged]
- brazzy 1y agoDOGE is doing no such thing. They are destroying things they don't understand, with a political agenda that has nothing to do with saving money, and doing immeasurable harm to the USA in the process. The link contains nothing but bullshit and lies. It's also guaranteed that many of them are using this opportunity of unfettered, in transparent access to illegally enrich themselves.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- BubbleRings 1y agoGreat read! Yeah, these days if I get asked for technical advice, I’m always glad to put good effort into suggestions. But as soon as you tell me “well I want to follow some of your advice, but I want to do this other stuff the wrong way”, I usually say “Good luck with all that!” and away I go.
- immibis 1y ago> Because sometimes, dishonest people do win. Dishonest people almost always win. Not any individual one - a particular dishonest person might only win 20% of the time - but in aggregate - the winner is almost always a dishonest person. Even when a game rewards honesty, dishonest people are willing to be honest if that's truly what gives them the greatest chance of winning, so they still win.
- mulmen 1y agoIs this some kind of inverse no true scotsman? If you win by being honest that’s not dishonest.
- aoki 1y agoI believe they are saying that there are multiple rounds, each with different games - some with honest optimal strategies and some with dishonest optimal strategies. A dishonest person can always choose the optimal strategy for each game, but the honest person can only choose the best honest strategy. So in aggregate the dishonest person comes out ahead.
- mulmen 1y agoOk but people are both honest and dishonest so how do you decide what type a person is?
- clysm 1y agoWhy the hell is there a line break after every sentence?
- robohoe 1y agoHello my high school research paper teacher
- amatecha 1y agoYeah, that's really a strange choice for formatting and makes it very hard to read. Not the typical practice to insert a <br> after every sentence... (that said, the post itself is a great read!)
- frizlab 1y agoI think it’s called ventilated prose. More commonly found in code comments.
- draga79 1y agoThe goal of truncating the sentences in that way was precisely to increase the suspense a bit, but I believe I miserably failed, making it just less readable.
- eks391 1y agoJust because they didn't see your vision doesn't mean it wasn't good. You clearly had an intent with it. For my anecdote, it worked for me and I didn't even notice the spacing until they pointed it out.
- Moru 1y agoIf you have a wide screen, you won't notice it so much. Try reading on a narrow screen in just about the wrong resolution and it will look like the author used notepad and hit enter every time they were too close to the edge instead of letting the program do the wrapping.
- 1y ago
- bzmrgonz 1y agoHow you gonna leave out the good parts like circa<year> so we can gauge the tech available then? Also, what about the tools you used to sync/backup to owner's house? My personal query, why did you move to freebsd? was it a different application/use? This is an awesome story, our modern approach would be to install nextcloud/owncloud with collaboration and rsync/syncthing to an offsite NAS (owner's house). As for your decision, I would have agreed to a directorship and hired a local MSP to do things the way I wanted. This would have allowed you to have your cake and eat it too. A lot of times, in these situations, all you need is trusted eyes and ears from outside the corrupted fold. This principle is used in the military and diplomatic core, there is a staffing structure, and then there is an XO, who is hired and controlled from HQ. This XO answers to HQ, not the local structure.
- draga79 1y agoWe're talking around 2009 — I don't recall the exact period, but that’s the era. For backups, I used rsync-based syncs and kept history by using hard links and rsync on top of those. I also had a Perl script that automated the whole thing, but I’ve long since forgotten its name. As for the rest — I hear you, and I totally agree. But at the time, I was young and more focused on building things with healthy clients who genuinely wanted to create something good, rather than trying to salvage a situation that, honestly, was nearly beyond saving. I switched the ALIX to FreeBSD for other tasks, and FreeBSD (with its native read only support) was perfect for the new workload.
- devrandoom 1y ago[flagged]
- jimbokun 1y agoWhat are the giveaways?
- devrandoom 1y ago[flagged]
- coolcase 1y agoSo... a vibe
- lmm 1y agoPlenty of human-written stuff like this. It reminded me of https://www.reddit.com/r/LinkedInLunatics/comments/1k7xkmk/you_gave_me_a_sad_kid_story_to_post_on_linkedin/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LinkedInLunatics/comments/1k7xkmk/y...
- ninetyninenine 1y agoWhat does AI writing do to the quality or veracity of the story? It it doesn't do anything to it, then it doesn't matter. A lot of people are becoming irrationally biased against AI in the same way that people can be irrationally racist (aka biased against race). Judge the piece on the writing alone, not whether it was written by or assisted by an AI.
- Fokamul 1y agoItalia. Money is not a problem, still they don't hire any consulting company. No organized crime involved. Sure ;-)
- draga79 1y agoNo, it wasn't organized crime.
- ThinkBeat 1y agoOne of the reasons why having boxes in a data center would be good. If there was big(?) money flowing through the company regularly, Keeping the server at the office and the backup in the owner's house seems like a shoestring budget. Which was way more common in the past years, esp in small companies when "IT" was to be cheap cheap, even if there was. But it seems that the client in this story did not worry about cost. Want a new server? No problem, A second one (windows) no problem? Was stuffing the box into a data center ever brought up?
- pixl97 1y agoThey didn't seem to state a year this was occurring in, and from what is written it sounds like the internet connection was insanely slow. Back in the 95-2010 range so many places outside of towns had pretty much no internet. Maybe you'd get a meg or two up and down. Can't do much offsite with that.
- pkaeding 1y agoIt sounds like one of the VMs was a samba file server, to serve shared files for the workstations in the office. That was a common thing to run locally in the office, to keep latency down.
- tiagod 1y ago> They didn't seem to state a year this was occurring in Maybe it was modified in the last two hours, but at least now it says "About 16 years ago".
- fifticon 1y agowith the wrong admin access, cloud data can be wiped just as easily :-(
- dogleash 1y agoDude, who cares, why does it matter? They successfully designed for the failure mode experienced. If you want to fantasize about design perfectionism no need to make it about how wrong they must have been.
- protocolture 1y agoI used to work for a not for profit. The level of legal graft was enormous. We once got audited by a government agency. Said government agency had been extensively burdened with restrictions in its operation by lobbying from the NFP space. After completing the audit, the gentleman running the government agency had a press release more less saying "I think it would be best if we were allowed to release our findings where they pertained to the expectations citizens have for the not for profit space, and not just where we find outright illegal behaviour. People should be able to understand exactly how much of a charities funding is used for its actual charitable purpose, and how much of its funds are effectively gifts for directors and staff" Which sort of sums it up. Graft goes on it just finds a legal path.
- nickdothutton 1y agoI have never seen a large NGO or charity where there was not a large degree of either grift, goofing-off, or a strong whiff of outright fraud of one sort or another. This has really coloured my view of all such orgs.
- bionsystem 1y agoCharity and non-profit look to me like the easiest way to finance corruption with tax evasion, while making yourself (esp. if you're a billionaire) look good.
- protocolture 1y agoI dunno, probably differs based on jurisdiction but the one thing that cant happen in my jurisdiction is people on the board directly profiting from the charity. They get well kept mind. But they never "own" the proceeds. IIRC one of the directors of mine was found with 3 corporate vehicles assigned to him. Now on the flipside, being upper management in the same charity was a goldmine. Upper 6 figure salary, no expectations, vendors taking you on substantial holidays and meals to get your business, low 6 figure bonus every 12 months. Different worlds tbh.
- protocolture 1y ago
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mrweasel 1y agoOdd observation: Many stories like this involves NetBSD for som reason.
- Adambuilds 1y agoIn the healthcare industry, there have been instances where vital patient data was either lost or improperly handled due to lack of proper systems and oversight. In one case, a hospital that had relied on outdated paper records for years faced a crisis when an employee accidentally deleted critical data. It wasn’t until the hospital implemented an integrated digital system that could track and back up data that they regained trust with patients and stakeholders.
- hkgjjgjfjfjfjf 1y ago[dead]
- pak9rabid 1y agoPCEngines! Man, I've been running my Linux firewall/router & AP's off these machines for years. They are rock solid.